RUDIMENTS, pt. 693
(and that's reality!)
I often sit around just going
over things that I recall from
earlier episodes of my life,
and they're not all pleasant.
I should have been able to
read the handwriting on the
wall, when it was there; but I
guess I didn't. It's somehow
considered just and ideal when
the 'punishment' fits the crime.
I've never seen that. I've never
even been able to find a parity
between the two : the living
of this life is one thing - for
most people it's on automatic -
but the bearing up under the
strangely psychic burden of
what it ends up as is another
thing entire. My old friend
Jane Roberts, and others, used
to try pitching the pennies of
'you make your own reality'
at the solid wall of 'that which
happened to you' and find a
blissful equivalence between
the two antipodes. That worked
to an extent. Jane used to go on,
using her 'medium' voice coming
through her, about the sureness
of expectation that can be had
when the individual oversoul
within each of us finds the very
empowering moment of realizing
that all life is a changing grid
that is manufactured from
within. To Jane that was all
encompassing, and it ran from
controlling one's health, to
money and riches too. I guess
it had to. Jane was crippled up
for the most part of her life,
a strangely lethal character
who was in all other respects,
and outside of her Seth
characterization (the Medium
within her) quite ordinary
and almost lady-normal,
It all worked together, to an
extent, and for many years,
quite successfully for her
and for her husband, Robert
Butts, the transcriber and
keeper of all these psychic
notes (books and books worth,
covering many topics - Cezanne
to psychic politics). At Prentice
Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ,
back then) her Editor, Tom
Mossman, smoothly added his
two cents to all this as well -
keeping well-oiled the gentle
workings of all that publishing
and editing and mechanical
stuff needed to make it work.
If Seth was the 'lead guitarist,'
let's say Rob played drums
(his cadence and record-keeping
and timing), while Tom was
always at work on keyboard
glissandos and Jane hacked away
at a bass guitar. Maybe there was
a rhythm guitar in that mix also,
but I couldn't find it. The constant
accompanists were, like me, a
bunch of loose flakes, floating
around, with some background
noise. Anyway, Jane died of her
own crippled-ness, the same
disease that did one did the other,
and there was no self-curing,
through consciousness, for here,
not even for her, who preached
it. I only saw one thing out of
that : Reality bites!
-
In Elmira, I used to see them around
often enough. Rob drove some old
Plymouth Valiant and Jane, in the
passenger seat, always waited in
the car - Rob would park at one
of those shop-plaza like places
that had convenient parking, right
in the middle of downtown. It was
called 'Langdon Plaza' in honor of
the Langdon family (Mark Twain's
wife's named as Olivia Langdon).
It had been the location of the large
Langdon home, conveniently torn
down to make way for the 1950's
version of car-paradise; grocer, shoes,
pharmacy, pizza, used clothing and
bookstore, pretty much. There was
an Allstate Agency office in there
as well, as I can recall. If 'Oversoul
Seven' had created that reality, I
always thought, it was fairly lousy.
That was part of the problem with
all that cosmic stuff - it really
needed some weeding and straining.
It let too much stuff in : the mass
of situations within what we deem
as Reality bears too much weight
to be held up as a whimsical and
self-created situation over and over
for each person. Seems so anyway -
the resultant clashes would be
resonant with wars, battles, feuds,
fights over territory and doctrine,
people and events. Hey, wait! it
is like that!
-
I tried. I really did. I attempted
bringing all this together and fusing
from it some iron-box doctrine of
being and the real - the same sort
of thing that religion and doctrine
does. Jane and Rob used to live
in an upstairs apartment along Water
Street (wasn't called that for nothing),
but were flooded out in the Agnes
flood of'72. After that they purchased
a nice house on a hill sort of more
atop Elmira, in a small grove of
trees and land. Their displacement
was harsh, at first, but they liked it
and grew well into it. I visited there
a few times, and was always very
surprised at how ordinary it all
was. TV stuff scattered about, a
few of those supermarket check-out
line junky newspaper things, fanzines
and all. I just felt it 'off' to being a
place from which such resounding
notions of physics and personal
consciousness emanated. It never
fit my schema, but hey, there you
go again - that singular, personal
reality stuff happening right in my
face, and showing me the dangers
of the differences and probably
mistaken clashes in scenery. What
to do about all that? No one ever
answered.
-
It always seemed to me that a
better clarity was called for. There
has to be, somewhere, a unity. I'd
think. Otherwise, the compendium
of all the differences would be
mind-numbing. And how to then
account for the annoying things
we each must live with? Those
nearby with their mowers and
weed-whackers, loud cars and
musical firecrackers? I'm not
so sure I recall inviting any of
that over. It all just gets too easy
to be able to blame the situation
on the self without adhering first
to some base-ideology of the
underpinnings in the way, say,
that 'Science' does. I know all
about parallel universes and the
overlappings of realities and
concurrent time and revolving
manifestations. I even know about
resultant ideas of Karma and
Paradox and Chaos Theory. And
that all great, I guess; but if we're
sitting around at some congenially
multi-imagined cafe in 71st street
and the spilled coffee soaks your
pants, something there buddy's
a'gonna get burned. And that's
reality!
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